What Kinds of Suicide are There?

I think the title says it all--What kinds of suicide exist in Japanese culture?  It's a difficult question to ask, but I believe it is important for me to establish the different types of actions people take and how their choices influence the way people view suicide in Japanese society.  Is all suicide viewed as sympathetic and/or morally responsible, or are only specific types of suicide considered so?  It's one of those ambiguous notions that will be difficult for me to fully answer.  But hopefully I can shed some light on just how complex the trend of suicide--in both Japanese society and literature--really is.

I am basing most of my research in this post off of one of my key sources highlighted in my literature review.  It is a scholarly article by Wendy Jones Nakanishi entitled "The Dying Game: Suicide in Modern Japanese Literature."  Her analysis provided me with some fundamental facts about suicide--the idea that there are multiple circumstances in which suicide can become a viable option for the modern-day Japanese.

So what is there?

First, there's the idea that suicide can be "an honorable means of accepting blame or of shouldering responsibility," as Nakanishi states.  This can be tied back to the traditional samurai codes, in which men would commit seppuku--a type of suicide involving disemboweling oneself with a sword.

Choosing to die is linked to the concept of self-sacrifice, of acknowledging one's failure to be successful and/or carry out one's duties/obligations (whether they be militaristic, social, or moral).

Another example of suicide are the infamous lovers' suicide pacts, or shinju 心中(double suicide).  In contemporary literature, we see shinju as a running theme in Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's novel Quicksand.  We also see similar themes in Haruki Murakami's works, as Nakanishi points out.  If we look at Japan from a religious context, shinju makes a lot of sense.  People did and do not necessarily fear the afterlife or any type of moral reckoning upon death; thus, shinju is nothing but a pragmatic and romantic way to extricate one's relationship from the confines of strict social convention.

A third type of suicide is something probably more prevalent in the West--the idea of escaping from a problem that seems to have no end in sight.  In Japan, this can be attributed to either bullying, or ijime いじめ, or the pressure to pass difficult school entrance exams.

These are probably what most Westerners think of when they hear the phrase "suicide in Japan."  We tend to have this view of Japanese suicide as something we're more familiar with--social and school-related pressures--but we rarely seem to associate suicide with some of Japan's more traditional, culturally ingrained mores, such as honor, duty, and responsibility.

What do you guys think?  What do you think of when asked to ponder "suicide in Japan"?  Am I right in assuming that most Westerners would probably only think of the third type I listed above?